The Hindus
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Shvetaketu: a sage, in the Upanishads
Sikhs: followers of the religion founded by Guru Nanak, 1469-1539, in the Punjab
Sindhu: “river,” Greek and Persian word later used as the basis of the word for the people who lived east of the Indus, the Hindus
Sita: an incarnate goddess, the wife of Rama, in the Ramayana
Skanda: a son of Shiva, general of the gods, identified with Murukan in South India
Skull Bearers. See Kapalikas.
soma: a plant pressed to yield a hallucinogenic fluid, offered to the gods in the Vedas; also a name of the moon
Somanatha (Somnath): a great temple to Shiva, and the city around it, in southwest Gujarat
Sri Lanka: present-day name of the island previously known as Ceylon or Serendip but probably not Lanka
stupas: Buddhist relic mounds
Sufism: a mystical branch of Islam
Sugriva: a monkey king befriended by Rama in the Ramayana
Sukeshin: ogre (Rakshasa) devoted to Shiva, in the Puranas
Surya: the sun, a Vedic god
Sushruta: author of a medical text
Sutas: “Charioteers,” name of a caste of charioteers and improvisational bards, in ancient India
suttee (from Sanskrit sati): the burning of a woman on the pyre of her dead husband; also, the woman who does this
sva-dharma: one’s own particular dharma, in contrast with general (sadharana dharma)
svayambhu: “self-existent” or “self-created,” an epithet of Prajapati and of several other mythical creators; also applied to lingas and other religious symbols that appear in nature, without human agency
Swaminarayan: founder of the Satsangi sect, 1780-1830 CE
tamas: “darkness,” one of the three qualities or gunas of matter, according to Sankhya philosophy
Tamil: Dravidian language of South India
Tantra: form of Hinduism (also of Buddhism), and the texts and practices of those traditions
tapas: internal heat, generated through rigid self-control of the senses and violent yogic practices
Tej Singh: historical figure, the son of the commander of the fort of Senji under Aurangzeb; also a hero of Hindi folklore
Thapar, Romila: India’s greatest living historian of the ancient period
Thompson, Stith: author of a detailed index of the themes in folklore, 1885-1976 CE
Thugs (from the Sanskrit sthaga [“thief,” “rogue”]): members of a gang of assassins who worshiped Kali and terrorized the British in India
Tirumal: Tamil name of Vishnu
Tiruvacakam: “the sacred word”: a poem in praise of Shiva, composed by Manikkavacakar, c. 800 CE
Treta Yuga: “the Trey,” the second of the four degenerating ages (Yugas)
Trimurti: “triple form,” the trinity of Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva
Trishanku: king who tried in vain to get to heaven and remains stuck halfway there
trivarga: “triple path,” the three goals of human life ( purusha-arthas)
Tukaram: antinomian poet saint in Maharashtra, 1608-1649 CE
Tulsidas: poet, author of the Hindi Ramcharitmanas , 1532-1623 CE
Tvastri: Vedic architect, blacksmith, and artisan of the gods
twice born (dvi-ja): name of the three higher classes (varnas) of Hindu society, reborn on their initiation
ulama: conservative ruling body of Islam
Ulupi: a cobra woman married by Arjuna, in the Mahabharata
Upanishads: Sanskrit philosophical texts, from c. 500 BCE
Vaishnava: pertaining to Vishnu; a worshiper of Vishnu
Vaishyas: the third of the four classes (varnas) of ancient Indian society
Valin: monkey falsely accused of usurping his brother’s throne, unfairly killed by Rama, in the Ramayana
Valmiki: author of the Ramayana and, within it, guardian and tutor of Rama’s twin sons
Vama: “left-hand,” said of the more antinomian aspects of Hinduism, particularly of Tantrism
Varanasi: name of Kashi, Benares
varna: “color,” any of the four social classes of ancient India
varna-ashrama-dharma: the religious law pertaining to social class (varna) and stage of life (ashrama), often used as a description of Hinduism
varna-samkara: the mixture of classes, miscegenation
Varuna: Vedic god of the sky, the waters, and the moral law
vasana: “perfume,” the memory traces left by former lives
Vasudeva: the cowherd who adopts the infant Krishna and raises him, in the Puranas
Vatsyayana: author of the Kama-sutra
Vayu: god of the wind
Veda: “knowledge,” one of the three (or four) most ancient sacred texts; also used to denote all four Vedas plus the Brahmanas and Upanishads
Vedanta: “end of the Veda,” a term for the Upanishads and for the later philosophy based on the Upanishads
Vedantic: pertaining to the Vedanta
Vessantara Jataka: Buddhist text that tells the story of a king, Vessantara, who lost everything he had
Vibhishana: an ogre, the moralistic brother of Ravana, in the Ramayana
Vidura: a son of Vyasa born of a servant girl; an incarnation of dharma
viraha: separation, particularly the emotional agony of separation from a lover or from a beloved god
Virashaiva: a sect of Shaivas, also called Lingayats, founded by Basava c. 1106-1167 CE
Virochana: an antigod, father of Bali
Vishnu: a great god
Vitthal: a Maharashtrian god
Vithoba: a Maharashtrian god
Vivekananda: a holy man, one of the founders of the Vedanta movement, who brought Hinduism to Chicago in 1893 CE
Vritra: an antigod, Indra’s great enemy, in the Vedas
Vyasa: a sage, author of the Mahabharata and of Pandu, Dhritarashtra, and Vidura
Xuan Zang: Chinese visitor to India in the seventh century CE
Yajur Veda: the third Veda, arranged for the sacrifice
Yakshas, Yakshinis : forest and tree spirits, beautiful, able to confer fertility but sometimes malicious
Yashoda: the cowherd woman who adopted Krishna, in the Puranas
Yavakri: a sage who was killed because he raped a Brahmin’s wife, in the Brahmanas and the Mahabharata
Yavanas: “Ionians,” a Sanskrit word first for Greeks, then for any foreigners
yoni: the womb, the partner of the linga
Yudhishthira: oldest son of Pandu, begotten by Dharma
Yuga: an age, one of four periods of time in which everything degenerates
zenana: the part of a house or palace where women are secluded
Zoroastrians: members of a religion derived from the Iranian Avesta, involving the worship of fire
NOTES
PREFACE: THE MAN OR THE RABBIT IN THE MOON 1 There are some good short introductions (see, in the Bibliography, Hopkins, Kinsley, Knipe), longer reference works (Flood [Introduction and Companion ], Klostermaier, Michaels, Mittal, and Thursby), and books on Hinduism as it is lived today (Narayanan and Hawley). My own version of the history of the Hindus could be used as a basic textbook for a course over a fourteen-week semester: one week of introduction, one of conclusion, and two chapters a week for twelve weeks. I would recommend supplementing it with a good book on Indian history (Keay and Thapar are my favorites), a good survey (such as Flood’s or Glucklich’s), and a sourcebook (such as my Textual Sources for the Study of Hinduism, or Sources of Indian Tradition [3rd ed.], or the forthcoming Norton Anthology of World Religions). Basham’s The Wonder That Was India is still unbeatable as a general introduction to the cultures of India.
2 A good model is provided by Richman’s Many Ramayanas and Questioning Ramayanas, which trace the many Ramayanas throughout Hindu history.
3 Ramanujan, “Is There an Indian Way of Thinking?”
4 I have in mind works such as those provided by Shulman (et al.) on the Nayakas and Thapar on Somanatha.<
br />
5 Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology.
6 Tubb, “Barn, Ben, and Begging Bowl: Sanskrit Words and the Things in the World.”
7 Narayana Rao, “ Hinduism: The Untold Story.”
8 Srinivas, Religion and Society of the Coorgs.
9 Hardiman, The Coming of the Devi, 158.
10 Srinivas, Social Change, 7.
11 Kosambi, Myth and Reality, 91-92.
12 Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of men, 283.
13 Ibid., 23.
14 Pollock, “India in the Vernacular Millennium.”
15 Pollock, Literary Cultures in History.
16 Microhistory, in the hands of a master like Carlo Ginzburg, is another way to excavate these often lost ordinary histories, but microhistory requires a thick description to which a survey such as this cannot aspire.
17 With apologies to William Blake: “To see a world in a grain of sand/And a heaven in a wild flower,/Hold infinity in the palm of your hand/ And eternity in an hour.”
18 Schmidt, “The Origin of Ahimsa.”
19 Ramanujan, “Is There an Indian Way of Thinking?”
20 Shankara’s “Thousand Teachings,” 1.6 ; Mayeda 2.1.6, 212.
21 Hardiman, The Coming of the Devi, 51.
22 “Sasa Jataka,” Jataka, vol. 3, no. 316, 34-38 of PTS.
23 Doniger, The Implied Spider, 154-56.
24 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, part II, paragraph xi; citing Jastrow, “The Mind’s Eye.”
25 Alison Goddard, Times Higher Education Supplement , November 21, 2003, “Email Threats and Egg-throwing Spark Fears of Hindu Extremism,” See also Edward Rothstein, “The Scholar Who Irked the Hindu Puritains,” in “Arts and Ideas,” New York Times, January 31, 2005 (reprinted as “Daring to Tackle Sex in Hinduism,” in International Herald Tribune, February 2, 2005); William Dalrymple, “India: The War over History,” New York Review of Books, Vol. 52, no.6 (April 7, 2005).
26 IndianCivilization@yahoogroups.com; “Jiten Bardwaj”
27 Goddard, “Email Threats.”
CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION: WORKING WITH AVAILABLE LIGHT 1 Idries Shah, The Exploits of the Incomparable Mulla Nasrudin, 26. Idries Shah attributes the parable to Mulla Nasrudin.
2 For the idea that the Europeans have taught Hindus to say that India is timeless, see Sedgwick, Against the Modern World.
3 Lévi-Strauss, “Split Representation in the Art of Asia and America.”
4 The Narmamala of Ksemendra 3:44.
5 Hopkins, The Hindu Religious Tradition, 9.
6 Keillor, Pontoon.
7 Keay, India, 2.
8 Thapar, “Imagined Religious Communities,” 77.
9 Mishra, “Exit Wounds,” 81.
10 Alex von Tunzelmann, Indian Summer (Henry Holt, 2007), cited by Mishra, “Exit Wouds,”81.
11 Burghart, “The Category of ‘Hindu,’” 264-65.
12 Gottschalk, Beyond Hindu and Muslim.
13 Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence.
14 Paraskara, Paraskara grihya sutra 10.36, cited by Nath, Puranas and Acculturation, 202.
15 Michaels, Hinduism, 12-14.
16 Frykenberg, “The Emergence of Modern Hinduism,” in Sontheimer and Kulke, Hinduism Reconsidered, 31.
17 The act can be found at www.sudhirlaw.com/HMA55.htm.
18 Ronojoy Sen, Legalizing Religion, 6-38.
19 Ibid.
20 Brian K. Smith, “Exorcising the Transcendent,” requires six qualities out of a cluster of nine; Michaels, Hinduism, 20, cluster of five.
21 According to the 2004 Survey Report conducted by the Indian Census, 25 percent of persons aged fifteen years and above are reported to be vegetarian. But according to the 2006 the Hindu-CNN-IBN State of the Nation Survey, 40 percent of respondents were vegetarian (a figure that includes those who eat eggs), 55 percent of Brahmins are vegetarian, and in landlocked states such as Rajasthan and Haryana, where seafood is not available as a food source, more than 60 percent are vegetarians. Gujarat, the birthplace of Gandhi and home to a sizable Jain population, is predominantly landlocked, but only 45 percent vegetarian.
22 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations. Wittgenstein’s method was similarly applied to Hinduism by the anthropologist Gabriella Eichinger Ferro-Luzzi, in “The Polythetic Network.”
23 Doniger, The Woman Who Pretended, 7.
24 J. Z. Smith on center and periphery.
25 Pace Michaels (Hinduism), there can be no single “habitus.”
26 Doniger, “Hinduism by Any Other Name.”
27 Narayana Rao, “Hinduism : The Untold Story” and “Purana as Brahminic Ideology.”
28 Herodotus, History, 3.97-100. He called them Hindoi.
29 Thapar, Early History, 275.
30 Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 10.
31 W. C. Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion, 30.
32 Babur, Baburnama, 352.
33 Encyclopaedia Britannica, s.v. India.
34 Hiltebeitel, “Of Camphor and Coconuts,” 28.
35 For the usefulness of the word “Hinduism,” despite its drawbacks and the subjective nature of its boundaries, see the arguments for the similarly subjective reasons for delineating the elements of a myth, in Doniger, The Implied Spider.
36 Doniger O’Flaherty, Other Peoples’ Myths, chapter 3.
37 There are also more good books about the Mughals and the British, hot topics and topics for which there is more reliable data, than about the ancient period.
38 Jamison, Sacrificed Wife, 14; Patton, “If the Fire Goes Out, the Wife Shall Fast.”
39 The Mimamnsa school. Julia Leslie, The Perfect Wife 3, citing Shabda 10.8.10.22: praptipurvakah pratishedah bhavati.
40 Wayne Booth’s term, in The Rhetoric of Fiction.
41 Doniger, The Implied Spider.
42 Ramanujan, “Towards a Counter System.”
43 Hiltebeitel, Rethinking the Mahabharata, 166-67.
44 For this and other definitions of people beyond the Aryan pale in ancient India, see Doniger O’Flaherty, “The Origins of Heresy in Hindu Mythology” and “The Image of the Heretic in the Gupta Puranas.”
45 Doniger O’Flaherty, Women, Androgynes, and Other Mythical Beasts.
46 Trautmann, cited by Bryant, The Quest, 261.
47 Trautmann, ibid., queried this: “It has yet to be determined why exactly India has never been self-sufficient in horses. Climate? A relative scarcity of pasture?” In a word, yes.
48 Gommans, “The Rise of the Indo-Afghan Empire,” 70-73.
49 Trautmann, cited by Bryant, The Quest, 261.
50 Doniger, “Pluralism and Intolerance in Hinduism”; “Hindu Pluralism and Hindu Intolerance of the Other”; “Tolstoi’s Revenge”; “Do Many Heads Necessarily Have Many Minds?”
51 Festinger, When Prophecy Fails and Cognitive Dissonance.
52 Doniger O’Flaherty, Women, Androgynes, 5-7.
53 Forster, Hill of Devi, 199.
54 Doniger O’Flaherty, Other Peoples’ Myths, final chapter.
55 Mistry, Such a Long Journey, 183.
56 Orr, “Identity and Divinity.”
57 Stewart, “Satya Pír: Muslim Holy Man and Hindu God,” 578.
58 Katherine Ulrich’s wonderful term.
59 Doniger, “The Origins of Heresy.”
60 Sen, Identity and Violence.
61 Joh, Heart of the Cross, 53-55; Bhabha, The Location of Culture 7, 277, 168-69, 256, 19, 296, 360, 240, 322.
62 This phrase is Kristin Bloomer’s.
63 Pangborn, Zoroastrianism: A Beleaguered Faith, 8; “Sugar in the Milk: A Parsi Kitchen Story,” NPR, March 20, 2008:http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=88505980 & sc=emaf.
64 Doniger O’Flaherty, Siva, 318.
CHAPTER 2 . TIME AND SPACE IN INDIA 1 Forster, A Passage to India, chapter 12.
2 Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard, 29.
4 Wolpert, A New History, 6. This was the civilization of the northern Soan River valley.
5 Witzel, “Indocentrism,” 348.
6 Suess, Das Antlitz der Erde [The Face of the Earth].
7 Personal communication from Jim Masselos, Sydney, Australia, May 2006.
8 Sclater, “The Mammals of Madagascar.”
9 Macleane, Manual of the Administration of the Madras Presidency, 1885.
10 Frederick Spencer Oliver, A Dweller on Two Planets, wrote the book in 1883-86, died in 1899, and his mother published it in 1905.
11 Sumathi Ramaswamy, “Home Away from Home?,” 151 and 155.
12 Forster, A Passage to India, 12.
13 Keay, India, 4.
14 Mahabharata 3.12.13; 16.8.40 ; Doniger O’Flaherty, Origins of Evil, 261-62.
15 Keay, India, 4.
16 Harivamsha 86.35-53.
17 Lorenzen, Kabir Legends, 49, citing Paramananda’s Kabir Manshur.
18 Vishnu Purana 5.38.9-28.
19 Bhagavata Purana 11.3.1-28.
20 Kuiper, “The Bliss of Asa,” 113.
21 S. R. Rao, The Lost City of Dvaraka.
22 Doniger O’Flaherty, Origins of Evil, 88, 100. For the identification of the horse with the sacrificer and with Prajapati, see Shatapatha Brahmana 13.1.1.1 and 13.2.1.1. For the many variants of the story of Indra’s theft of the sacrificial horse of King Sagara, see Mahabharata 3.104-08; Ramayana 1.38-44; Vishnu Purana 4.4.1-33, etc. For a discussion of these stories, see Doniger O’Flaherty, Women, 220-22.
23 Ramayana 1.37-43; Shiva Purana 5.38; Linga Purana 1.66 ; Vayu Purana 88; Brahmanda Purana 3.46-53; Vishnu Purana 4.4; Doniger O’Flaherty, Siva, 230, and fn. 88.
24 Mahabharata 3.105-8.
25 Janaki, “Parasurama,” citing chapters 51-56 of the Brahmanda Purana.
26 Ibid., citing the Keralamahatmya.
27 Rig Veda 2.12.2, Maitrayani Samhita 1.12.13, Mahabharata 1.21.5. 2.
28 The legend of the cankams is first expressed in Nakkiranar’s commentary on the seventh-century Irayaiyanar Akapporul.
29 Das Gupta, Malabar Nation Trade.
30 Frontline, May 7-20, 2005.
31 T. S. Subramanian, in Frontline, 22: 2, (Jan., 15-28, 2005).
32 Keay, India, 3-5.